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Hear that? It’s the sound of nothing. No Christmas Carols, no bells jingling, no “Happy holidays!” or “Happy New Year” in place of hello or goodbye.

Save for our friends who follow the Orthodox calendar – and whose New Year celebrations arrive this week – we have emerged from an exhausting month of celebrating (Christmas, New Year, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus) and remembering (lists of the year’s 10 best movies, concerts, TV shows, roundups of news and world events we’d already forgotten).

And now it’s gone. We’ve entered a state of anomie, a period of non-celebration, embodied by this Saturday’s Nothing Day – an actual “un-event” listed for Jan. 16 for 33 years in Chase’s Calendar of Events.

Nothing Day was created in 1972 by San Francisco Examiner columnist Harold Pullman Coffin, and sponsored by (as Coffin would have it) the National Nothing Foundation of Capitola, Calif.

Its stated aim is to provide non-celebrants, “with one National Day when they can just sit without celebrating, observing or honouring anything.”

Coffin lived up to his surname, passing on in 1981 (although, given his sense of irony, I expect he was cremated). And if he thought people needed a break from celebrating in the ‘70s, he’d be gob-smacked by the 21st Century, when Christmas has essentially devoured several other celebrations, and now begins somewhere around the end of the baseball season.

So in remembrance of Harold Pullman Coffin, we hereby undertake to stop remembering and embrace nothing at least one day of the year. Here is a list of approved activities that will make your Nothing Day appropriately nothing special.

-Binge watch Seinfeld, still the consummate show about nothing.

-Can’t say for sure because I’ve never seen it performed. But Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing sounds promising.

-Speaking of Shakespeare, I believe he was presciently describing Transformers movies with the line in Macbeth abjuring, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” So yeah, a Transformers movie.

-Drink Coke Zero. Drink a ton of it. Tons of nothing is still nothing.

-Ponder Georg Hegel’s proposition that reality is not existence in and of itself, but merely a reflection of the world of ideas. What is mind? It doesn’t matter. What is matter? Never mind.

-Further to that, ponder Katherine Heigl’s demonstration that reality is a non-reflection of romantic comedies. You will learn nothing about the nature of human romantic relationships from her movies, making them perfect for Nothing Day.

A word of caution: Do not attempt to cement your relationship with your loved one as they do in Hollywood romantic comedies by leaping through airport security and preventing her from getting on the plane that would take you from her forever. You are the one who may be taken away forever, with more nothing on your plate than you’d originally anticipated.

(On a sidenote: I have been looking for years for an excuse to link the names “Hegel” and “Heigl.”)

-Keeping Up with the Kardashians is actually not recommended Nothing Day programming, since you will suffer a net loss of brain cells. A negative sum does not technically qualify as nothing.

You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by Bachman Turner Overdrive would be a valid choice, except the title is a double negative that implies you have indeed seen something. However, it can also be argued the title holds the promise of a future sighting of nothing. So play away, Randy!

-Watch The Big Lebowski, a movie that essentially ends where it started, with The Dude abiding. Be sure to cheer for the German nihilists.("Ve believes in nossing, Lebowski. Nossing!")

-Finally, consider Absolute Zero – the point at which the temperature has dropped so low (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) that molecular motion actually stops. This may be one of the truest physical manifestations of nothing. And in Winnipeg, in January, it’s also known as Tuesday.

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